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Paul Tracy, who drove Indy cars for two decades, is making the switch to sports cars in the Grand-Am Series. He's slated to drive the No. 5 Corvette with David Donohue this weekend in Montreal. Photo by LAT PHOTOGRAPHIC

Paul Tracy finds new challenges in Grand-Am Series

August 13, 2012

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Paul Tracy is working on the latest chapter of his racing career, and he's hoping for a big finish.

Tracy, who took the green flag 281 times and won 31 times in open-wheel cars with Championship Auto Racing Teams and in the IndyCar Series from 1991-2011, is running a part-time schedule in the Grand-Am Series. This weekend, he'll be making his fifth start of the season and first for the Action Sports team in a Corvette DP in the Montreal 200 as the series visits Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.

Tracy, 43, will co-drive the No. 5 entry along with David Donohue, and he admits that he's still learning the finer points of racing sports cars. On Tuesday, the veteran driver from Scarborough, Ontario, participated in a teleconference to help promote this week's race:

Q: Paul, what are your thoughts driving at Montreal for the first time in a Daytona Prototype?

Paul Tracy: I think it's great. This is a great opportunity for me to get in a current spec car with Action Express and a Corvette motor. So I'm excited. I haven't driven the new-style cars, so I'm excited to get the opportunity, and actually yesterday went to Watkins Glen and made a seat in the parking lot of the hotel where the team was camped out with Donohue.

So we had an opportunity to meet and go over our strategies for the weekend, and we'll fly up to Montreal tomorrow.

Q. I understand that a number of teams did contact you about running in the Nationwide Series [at Montreal], specifically the MacDonald Motorsports No. 81 car. How close were you to signing a deal?

PT: Well, we talked to a couple of teams, but obviously when this deal came up a couple weeks ago, I wanted to put all my focus into the Action Express team and not dilute the whole weekend jumping from one car to another. This is an opportunity for me to hopefully open the door for the next year and try to do the best job I can. I had an option to do a Nationwide car, but like I said, I didn't want to be jumping back and forth from one car to another. I just want to focus on doing a good job for Action Express.

Q. I'm just wondering, you're not in IndyCar this year and not in a full-time ride for a couple of years. Now you're looking at Grand-Am. Do you see your career kind of making a transition into something different, and how do you feel about that?

PT: I'm fine with that. Obviously, I had a great, long career in IndyCar. I raced Indy cars for 22 years, and it doesn't go on forever. Now that I've been out of IndyCar for almost a year now, my focus has really changed and what is the next phase of my career and what I want to do.

I've always dabbled a little bit in Grand-Am. I've always enjoyed the racing the most high-tech cars in terms of an ALMS car or something like that. What I like about the Grand-Am cars is the field is very equal. The cars at first and the last is usually within less than a second, and the racing is really good.

You don't have one car that is so much better than the rest like an Audi against the rest of the nonfactory teams like you have in World Endurance.

The racing is really competitive. There is a lot of good racing and beating and banging and guys that are really racing hard with each other for two- to three-hour races, and then you have 24-hour races when you have two to three cars battling and banging wheels at the end of the 24 hour race, and I really enjoy that part of it. This is what I would like to do next year full-time.

Q. Would you sort of say--not that you didn't have fun in your IndyCar career--but is this more fun racing for the sheer joy of it rather than anything else? You always want to be competitive and do well. But it seems that you don't really need to do this anymore?

PT: No, obviously I want to race because I still love to race, and this is a great avenue for me to get what I'd like to get out of the racing side of it. The racing world obviously, any racing driver will tell you that you're not going to get rich being a sports-car driver, but I still have the passion to drive. I still have a lot of passion to be in a race car, and these cars are a lot of fun to drive, which makes it even more fun.

Q. Paul, I know I was looking at some statistics on you in your past racing career, and which [style of] racing was the most difficult to adapt to and why?

PT: That's a difficult question to answer, because every type of car that you drive, whether it be an Indy car or a sports car or NASCAR, all are completely different from each other. And every series has guys that are tougher in every car. Grand-Am you have the guys that are through it. And Memo Rojas, and you have, obviously Ryan Dalziel, and these guys are really, really good at driving sports cars.

Obviously, in NASCAR you have guys like Jimmie Johnson and Tony Stewart. They're really, really good at what they do. And in IndyCar, you have guys like Dario [Franchitti] that are really, really good. So to jump from one to another and try to do all of it now, it's pretty tough to do, because guys are--the top guys are really good at the cars they drive.

With the times of guys like Mario Andretti and A.J. Foyt, who would jump from a sports car to a stock car one week and do a Formula One race, those times are pretty tough to do now.

But we all love to drive all these different types of cars, but like Alex [Tagliani], it's very difficult to get into good rides, because it is so specialized now.

Q. Paul, I know you've had a few Daytona Prototypes under your belt. Have you found that anything has changed in your driving style coming from IndyCar to the Daytona Prototype?

PT: Not so much. The Grand-Am cars, the DP cars, they handle pretty much like a road-racing car. Obviously, they're not an Indy car, but when you ask it to do something, it responds pretty well.

Having driven in NASCAR before, it is kind of the opposite of that. If you try to muscle a car around and make it do what it doesn't want to do, then that's where you struggle.

So I think that's one of the big problems with a lot of open-wheel guys have when they try to transition from an open-wheel car to a stock car is it just is not going to react like the road-racing car. The cars are built to run on all wheels.

From that standpoint, transitioning to a Grand-Am car, it's not that big of a transition because the car reacts and does a lot of the same things. Setup stuff is fairly similar, so it's not a big transition.